Recruiters should watch for Virginia boy

High-tech recruiters planning for their companies' futures ought to start tracking the budding career of 12-year-old Dakota Brown, who has already proven his ingenuity.

According to an Associated Press story, the sixth-grader from suburban Richmond, Va., triggered the recall of some 160,000 Texas Instruments calculators after discovering a flaw that could have given students an unfair advantage on the state's standardized tests.

Texas Instruments, at the state education department's urging, had disabled the key converting decimals into fractions on calculators intended for middle school students, the story said. But Brown figured out that pressing a certain two keys on the calculator works as a decimal-to-fraction converter, something students on the test are supposed to do with pencil and paper, according to the story.

The Chesterfield County school district honored Brown in a ceremony and Texas Instruments sent him a graphing calculator. Maybe the company should have offered him an internship, as well.